Social media platforms such as Twitter® and Facebook® have introduced new means of quasi-public communication that are both nearly instantaneous and readily searchable. Various tools have been developed to enable users to search social media posts for content, but these tools only facilitate searching content expressly included within each post or metadata directly connected with each post. Tools are needed to enable entities, particularly service providers, to recognize latent user sentiments associated with posts. User sentiments provide an important context to social media posts (such as urgency), but no tools currently exist to determine user sentiments from social media posts. Additionally, service providers frequently suffer customer attrition without notice when customer sentiment towards the service providers becomes negative. Tools for determining customer sentiments are also needed by to enable service providers to reduce attrition and retain customers.